no more whip, thank God, laid on too often when it was least needed
and most felt.

And there are no more quarrels, too. Old personal feuds, old party
bickerings, old differences of creed, and hatreds in the name of the God
of love--all those are past, in that world of which the Abbey is to me a
symbol and a sacrament. Pitt and Fox, Warren Hastings and Macaulay, they
can afford to be near to each other in the Abbey; for they understand
each other now elsewhere; and the Romish Abbot's bones do not stir in
their grave beside the bones of the Protestant Divine whom he, it may be,
would have burned alive on earth.

In the south aisle of Henry the VIIth's Chapel lies in royal pomp she who
so long was Britain's bane--'the daughter of debate, who discord still
did sow'--poor Mary Queen of Scots. But English and Scots alike have
forgotten the streams of noble blood she cost their nations; and look
sadly and pityingly upon her effigy--why not?

Nothing is left of her
Now but pure womanly.

And in the corresponding aisle upon the north, in a like tomb--which the
voice of the English people demanded from the son of Mary Stuart--lies
even a sadder figure still--poor Queen Elizabeth. To her indeed, in her
last days, Vanity of vanities--all was vanity. Tyrone's rebellion killed
her. 'This fruit have I of all my labours which I have taken under the
sun'--and with a whole book of Ecclesiastes written on her mighty heart,
the old crowned lioness of England coiled herself up in her lair, refused
food, and died, and took her place henceforth opposite to her 'dear
cousin' whom she really tried to save from herself--who would have slain
her if she could, and whom she had at last, in obedience to the voice of
the people of England, to slay against her will. They have made up that
quarrel now.

Ay, and that tomb is the sacred symbol of a reconciliation even more
pathetic and more strange. Elizabeth lies--seemingly by her own
desire--in the same vault as her own sister, Mary Tudor. 'Bloody Mary,'
now, no more. James the First, who had no love for either of them, has
placed at the head of the monument 'two lines,' as has been well said,
'full of a far deeper feeling than we should naturally have ascribed to
him'--

'Fellows in the kingdom, and in the tomb, Here we sleep; Mary and
Elizabeth the sisters; in hope of the resurrection.'

I make no comment on those words; or on that double sepulchre. But did I
not say wel